Integration Components in Centos 5.4:

When installed into a virtual machine running a supported Linux operating system, the Linux Integration components provide the following functionality:

Driver support for synthetic devices: The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed specifically for Hyper-V.

Hypercall adapter: The Hypercall adapter is a thin layer of software that sits underneath the Xen-enabled Linux kernel, and translates the Xen-specific virtualization function calls to Microsoft Hyper-V hypercalls. This results in faster performance for the Linux virtual machine.

*BETA* Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in the form of an early “preview” driver. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out.

*BETA* Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance."

You can download the latest Linux IC ISO at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads
Assuming you have already installed CentOS, follow these steps to compile and install the Linux IC and the synthetic HID and Mouse drivers. These same steps should work for you with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, too. Maybe someday I’ll get around to do this with my Ubuntu VMs.
Anyway, the following is a series of steps culled from a wide variety of How-To pages, none of which produced exactly the results I was looking for. Those sites are listed as sources at the end of this post.

I've added this CentOS 5.4 demo to WDCPRWV25 Hyper-V and assigned it a hostname and DNS assignment as centos54demo.hmco.com. I have not added an ADM address, backups, inteQ. Nor have I removed the default SCSI adapter so that the synthetic SCSI adapter can be enumerated by the OS. Still need to do that.

SSH has been enabled for root logins. Root pass is consistent with Unix Prod. Let me know if you change that. Oh! The X Server is not started by default but it is available if you want to set up to export that via SSH.

Hyper-V customers are running both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as guests. We have provided Linux integration components for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but customers did not have the same level of performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest since the IC’s were not supported for RHEL.

We are excited to announce the availability of Linux integration components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) which provides synthetic network and storage drivers enabling RHEL to work with the optimized devices provided by Hyper-V. We’ve already submitted these drivers to the upstream Linux kernel in July 2009 (read here for more information) and are looking forward to these being integrated with a future version of RHEL. In the meantime, Microsoft will provide full support for these drivers. Red Hat provides best effort support for these components. Customers interested in understanding how these are supported by Red Hat prior to their inclusion natively into to their distribution can read the details at the Red Hat Knowledge Base article.

To download this new version of the Linux Integration Components, visit this link on the Microsoft Download Center.

We have just released the beta of the next version of the Linux integration services. This release brings some much wanted and requested new functionality to our Linux support on Hyper-V. Specifically it brings:

• Support for running Linux with up to 4 vCPUs per virtual machine.

• A time synchronization component to provide the same time synchronization functionality that we have for Windows virtual machines.

• A shutdown integration components so that Linux virtual machines can be shutdown directly from the Hyper-V user interface / WMI interfaces
This release is currently available on Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com) under the “Linux Integration Services for Microsoft Hyper-V” connection (which you can go and sign up for right now).
This release is supported on all versions of Hyper-V out there – namely: